Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl

Wesley went everywhere with me from then on. I even wrapped him in baby blankets and held him in my arms while grocery shopping, to keep him warm during the first cold winter. Occasionally someone would ask to see "the baby," and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, "What is that?! A dinosaur?" Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms.

Wesley taught me the Way of the Owl. In the human world your value as a person is often intrinsically linked to your wealth or most recent accomplishment. But all the accoutrements of the world were stripped away from me when I got sick. Welsey made me realize that if all I had to give was love, that was enough. I didn't need money, status, accomplishment, glamour or many of the empty things we so value.

People seem to deny the existence of animal emotions so that they can continue to justify inhumane treatment and exploitation and avoid the fact that our actions have a deep emotional impact on our fellow beings.

Because predators tend to eat the weakest of a species, they keep the remaining population strong. Without predators, herds become weak and disabled. In contrast, when humans hunt animals for trophies, they kill the strongest of the species, thereby weakening the herd.

When describing both the act of defecating and the substance of fecal matter itself, biologists prefer to use the scientific term "poop." It's both a noun and a verb. A popular field of biology called scatology is the study of scat, which is not to be confused with mere poop. Although technically they're the same, we call it "scat" if we are studying it to learn something about the health and diet of an animal. When the animal has pooped on us or has ruined something with his pooping, we tend to use the term "shit," as in, "Oh, man, he just shit down the back of my neck." So if it's on the ground, it's poop. If it's under your microscope, it's scat. If it's running down your neck, it's shit.

Of course, owls on the loose seemed strange to the uninitiated. One day an electrician came to work on the building's power supply, when, seemingly out of nowhere, an owl flew around a corner right at him. The poor guy let out an unearthly scream and hit the floor, covering his head and yelling in Spanish.

Ignorance of the actual dynamics of daily life can be bliss sometimes. Because we know chemistry and biology, we know that when we smelled something, the molecules from the source of the smell had actually entered our noses and taken up residence on our receptors. So when we smelled a dirty person, this meant that some of his filthy molecules had actually gotten into our nasal passages. This bothered us. We didn't want to know that person that well, and we certainly didn't want his disgusting molecules in our nasal receptors.

It was a lot like working at Hogwarts, except that, instead of receiving letters from our owls, we would find coughed-up owl pellets in our coffee mugs.

Wesley was always outraged when he woke himself up with a screech in his sleep, and he blamed me. He would whip around to face me with an intense librarian’s stare as if I had broken a cardinal rule.

To that which you tame, you owe your life.

He flapped and hopped until he was up in the air and, frantically looking around, eyed the dining room table again and headed its way. This time he stuck his feet out in front of him and held them open like hands trying to grab solid ground. But it didn’t help. He hit the table, slid on his rear all the way across, and crashed on the floor again. Again I dissolved in laughter and again Wesley stared stonily at the wall. I stopped laughing abruptly when I realized that Wesley was embarrassed. Learning to fly is physically and emotionally very difficult, and human owl mothers should not laugh at their babies. From then on I tried my hardest to keep a straight face. Most pet owners know that animals can read emotions such as anger, approval, affection, and acceptance. But it had never occurred to me that perhaps an animal could feel ridiculed. From that point forward, no one in Wendy’s house was allowed to laugh at Wesley, at least not in front of him, while he was learning to fly. Sometimes we had to run into the bathroom, shut the door, and burst out laughing.

Refusing to do your bidding is not the same as stupid.

It was an owl hug. I hoped he would do it again. He did, and this vulnerable position became his new way of cuddling. I never got over the wonder of it and I often felt tears stinging my eyes. This complicated wild soul had stretched his golden wings over me in complete trust. I wouldn’t trade those moments for anything in the world. Not for anything in the world.

When humans and animals understand, love, and trust each other, the animals flourish and we humans are enlightened and enriched by the relationship.

We repress, deny, subjugate, dissociate, and use all kinds of conscious and unconscious machinations to separate ourselves from our feelings, but animals have no such recourse, so their emotions likely are raw and strong.

IN THE WILD, the father owl hunts relentlessly. He has to provide approximately six mice per baby per night. The usual brood is five babies. The father also has to feed his mate, who never leaves the nest and eats about three mice per day. And he must feed himself about four mice a day. This adds up to some thirty-seven full-grown mice every night during nesting season.